From Hans Christian Anderson award-winning author Philippe Fix, a dazzling portrait of a dreamy optimist filling Paris with ingenious gadgets, toys, and magical contraptions.



Seraphin, dreaming of gardens full of birdsongs, sunny avenues, and flowers, works as a ticket seller in a metro station underground. One day, after being scolded by the stationmaster for trying to save a butterfly that had flown into the station by accident, he learns that he has inherited an old, dilapidated house. Overjoyed by the possibilities, he and his friend Plume set about building the house of their dreams, and much more besides! Philippe Fix's illustrations, cinematic in their scope, have enchanted children since their 1967 début. In a fresh translation, Seraphin now allows a new generation to experience the wonder and inventive spectacle of the original.

Philippe Fix is a French illustrator and author of children's books. He studied at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He is best-known for creating the character Chouchou, who first appeared in a comic strip in 1963, in the magazine Salut!. Seraphin received the Prix du meilleur livre loisirs jeunes and honorable mentions for the Premio Critici in Erba for the 1970 Bologna Children's Book Fair, and for the Premio Grafico for the 1972 Bologna Children's Book Fair. His children's books have been translated into over a dozen languages.



About the translator: Donald Nicholson-Smith is a translator and freelance editor. His translation of poems by Abdellatif Laâbi, In Praise of Defeat (Archipelago), was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2017, and his translation of Jean-Patrick Manchette's The Mad and the Bad received the 2015 French-American Foundation Translation Prize. Nicholson-Smith has also translated works by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Henri Lefebvre, Antonin Artaud, and Guillaume Apollinaire, among others.